January’s hang out/webcast is this Friday, January 24, at 1:00 PM US Central time. We’ll start out going over all the latest happenings with the project. Then we’ll have a tutorial on firewall and NAT fundamentals. I’ll go through how things work, best practices, and some guidance for troubleshooting. There will also be time for questions. This session is available for gold and support subscribers only. You can find the link to join after logging into your account here, under January Hang Out Details.

If you can’t make it while we’re live, you’ll find the recording archived in the members area shortly after we’re finished.

We’re doing an online hang out on Friday, December 13. We’ll get started at 1:00 PM US Central time, and go for roughly an hour. I have a presentation for the first portion, going over the new features and changes in 2.1 release, and what we’re currently doing on the coming 2.2 release. Then I’ll present a tutorial on troubleshooting port forwarding. There will be time for audience questions as well.

This is the first in what will be a monthly recurring series. Each month, we’ll have a how to tutorial on a specific topic or area of the system, and updates on development and other happenings with the project. We have several topics in mind, but also welcome community suggestions on topics (if nothing else, that will help us prioritize).Read the rest of this entry »

pfSense Gold is our $99 per year premium membership subscription program, designed to provide special benefits to our members while supporting ongoing development of the Open Source pfSense project. We hope this dual benefit will make Gold a program worth subscribing to.

Current exclusive benefits for Gold members include:

Access to our AutoConfigBackup secure cloud based backup service for up to 10 hosts.**

Immediate pre-publication access to the updated pfSense: The Definitive Guide book in PDF, fully updated for the pfSense 2.1 release. This is a significant update to the current book, and currently has approximately 200 additional pages. PDF available for immediate download after purchase!

Monthly online MeetUp! Video conference using Google Hangouts or similar technology, hosted by a rotating selection of core developers with occasional special guests. We will announce demos / topics in advance and take general questions from the audience.

We’ve tagged 2.1 as RC0, as release time nears. This means it’s feature-complete, and has no significant known regressions from prior releases. How much longer until release depends on what’s discovered from here out. We don’t anticipate there being a long release candidate cycle, given how widespread 2.1 usage has been over the past year plus. Now’s the time to help test!

Please post anything that requires follow up to the 2.1 board on the forum rather than the comments here on the blog. Far more people are active on the forum and will see it there.

The master branch in git has been bumped to 2.2-ALPHA in preparation for development on 2.2 release. We’ll soon be putting efforts into getting our patches and code up to speed for FreeBSD 10.x for 2.2 release.